...I talked, over lunch, with Dr. Eugene Wong. So busy I forgot to mention it! It was a great conversation. (This was in the context of an open meeting at TCD, so I ended up talking to him by chance). We talked for about an hour, and it went by in a breeze. When he introduced himself he mentioned he was a Professor at Berkeley (Professor Emeritus, it turned out) and one of the creators of the INGRES database engine (which immediately in my head flagged that he was a pioneer of many of the concepts of relational databases that we take for granted today), and I was of course duly impressed and humbled. Only later I found out about his other activities (e.g. NSF Director). The most striking thing was when we were talking about research in the US, and in replying to a question of his I mentioned I had worked at IBM Research in Yorktown heights in the late 90's. To this he said, "Oh, I worked there too. When they had just opened the building."

In the early 1960s, that is.

So. Much. History.